Our media: Needing a Dick Armey Edition

DougJ Admission of failure

That’s what this exchange in today’s WaPo chat sounds like:

Kensington, Md.: Am I the only one who finds it irritating and childish when the media (and the public) assigns credit or blame to a president for the outcome of a small-scale touch-and-go military operation on the other side of the world? I’m a huge Obama supporter, but he is no more a hero because the waves held steady as our Navy sharpshooter took his aim than Jimmy Carter was a goat because an unexpected sandstorm jammed the helicopter engines during the 1980 hostage rescue mission. Does the media truly have no idea how irrational (and unrealistic) this hero/goat assignment practice is?

Michael A. Fletcher: No comment there. But it is our common practice. Think of the instant analysis after political debates about who “won.” Remember Al Gore’s eye roll? What did that have to with the substance of his answers? But did it say somehting about his personality? Rightly or wrongly, these incidents often come to define presidents, and I don’t think it is just because of the media coverage. It probably speaks to the few windows we get into their decision making. In this case, Obama could have said we’re not going to do something that risky. Or he could have done what he did—I think that says something, even if it doesn’t say as much as we often make it out to.

Until this begins to change, our political system is largely screwed. Leaders are now judged, at best, by random events over which they have little control, and, at worst, by Villagers’ sad attempts at psychoanalysis. Bush managed to transcend that through the magnitude of his incompetence, but, even then, it took the Village until 2005 to realize it, so wowed were they by the straight talk and the flight suit and what not.

Maybe some day that will change. But I’m not optimistic.

Think Progress: Fox host wonders if Obama administration will send ‘spies’ to tea parties.

Today, the Department of Homeland Security released a report on the growing influence of radical right-wing extremists. On Fox News this afternoon, guest host David Asman willingly tied the Fox-promoted, lobbyist-funded, “grassroots” tea party movement to such right-wing radicals, and suggested that the Obama administration might send “spies” to the tea parties to track extremists:

I’m looking at the report and it says, among other things, that the federal government is going to begin gathering information on right-wing extremist activity in the United States. Does that mean they’re going to be sending spies to these tea parties?

Asman continued to group conservatives with radical extremists later in the segment, asking whether the DHS report was just “an effort to shut up their critics.” Watch it:

Similarly, Michelle Malkin today referred to the report as the “Obama DHS hit job on conservatives.” TNR’s Jonathan Chait wondered why conservatives seem so happy to lump themselves with the “murderous lunatics” the report targets. “I kind of figured conservatives would try to define potential domestic terrorists as the fringe right,” Chait writes. “But there’s Michelle Malkin calling potential terrorists ‘conservatives.’”

UpdateNoting the constant use of the word "revolution" in the tea party promotions, the Washington Independent's David Weigel writes that "if they want to use this rhetoric, they can’t really be too angry when the government frets about a rising tide of violent government overthrow rhetoric."

• Anonymous Liberal adds: Earth to Michelle Malkin

  Michelle Malkin is completely bent out of shape over the release of a Department of Homeland Security report analyzing the risk of violence in the coming years from radical right wing extremist groups. One of the reports rather obvious conclusions is that the combination of the current economic climate (record unemployment) and the current political climate (Democrats in control the government, black man with Muslim-sounding name as President) is a recipe for increased violence among fringe right wing groups.
  
  Malkin seems to think this report represents some sort of plot by leftists in the Obama administration to target people like herself and her merry band of teabaggers. Implicit in her rant is the notion that there couldn't possibly be any legitimate concerns underlying this report. The reality, though, is that this report was almost surely written by a career analyst at DHS, not a partisan operative, and its conclusions are as obvious as they are non-controversial.
  
  I wonder if Malkin happens to remember what the single deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil was prior to 9/11. That's right, it was the 1995 bombing in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people (many of them children) and wounded over 800. And it was carried out by right wing extremists. Moreover, in the years directly preceding the bombing, the country had been in recession and the Democrats had taken control of Congress and the White House. Indeed, the entire Clinton presidency was marked by increasing radicalism among fringe right wingers that eventually led to the creation of armed militia groups all over the country.
  
  Maybe I'm crazy, but this sounds like exactly the sort of threat the Department Homeland Security is responsible for monitoring. Wouldn't DHS be frighteningly derelict in its duties if it wasn't trying find the next Tim McVeigh before he blows up hundreds of people?
  
  There's a huge irony in Malkin's paranoia, too. For the last few years, she and her pals have been vigorously defending the Bush administration's claimed authority to conduct warrantless domestic surveillance in violation of the law. But those very laws were put in place to protect people like Malkin from exactly the kind of abuse she now fears. Luckily for Malkin, it's very unlikely that the Obama administration would ever claim the authority to violate those laws, which means that if DHS wants to listen to her inane and delusional conversations, it'll have to get a warrant.

• Tim F. The Point (You’re Never Gonna Get It)
  

  The same thing about which John warned the Malkin fringe again and again, illustrated this time by Glenn.

  When you cheer on a Surveillance State, you have no grounds to complain when it turns its eyes on you. If you create a massive and wildly empowered domestic surveillance apparatus, it’s going to monitor and investigate domestic political activity. That’s its nature.

  A rightwing “patriot” blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building and killed 168 Americans. Another rightwing activist committed a series of bombings that killed two people and injured at least 150 others. A heavy FOX News consumer shot up a Unitarian church in Knoxville for reasons that he plainly described as politically eliminationist. Last week a white supremacist shot three police officers in cold blood after posting a string of online commentary that echoed hysterical rightwing radio rants almost word-for-word. The shooter admitted that he would have killed more if he could.

  Here is a suggestion if Michelle still needs shoulder to cry on. Go find a cop. There’s no need to come to southwestern PA; I saw squad cars from Michigan, Massachusetts and Canada at Thursday’s funeral. Tell him or her how completely unfair it feels to have the government keeping an eye on paranoid gun fetishists. She can explain to her new friend how the government was never meant to use unrestrained police powers on her kind of American.
  —-

  At least now I can stop wondering whether rightwing torture-and-wiretap freaks ever understood that putting ‘Islamic’ or ‘terrorist’ in the title of a law is not a great way to limit its scope to people they consider Islamic terrorists. If the meaningful part of a law has no penalty for using supposed ‘antiterrorist’ powers on anyone that a law enforcement agency damn well pleases then that is what it will do.

  Republicans were not just trying to grease laws with titles that nobody would want to vote against. They really believed that a law’s title and its preamble, if the author even bothered, had some totemic power to protect conservative ultrapatriots from the vile treatment that they wanted to impose on others. Evil, yes, in the obvious pleasure they took in seeing mostly innocent prisoners tortured. But definitely also stupid.

  Watching Malkin, the other Boleyn girl, squirm now after she smugly cheered the disappearance of Catherine of Aragon Jose Padilla only a few years ago does not exactly feel good. But it sure isn’t wrong.

Benen on INNUENDO OVERLOAD....

I'm just a little surprised on "Countdown" last night, MSNBC's David Shuster had the chutzpah to say this on the air about the "Tea Party" events.

"Tea bagging is not a spontaneous uprising.... The people who came up with it are a familiar circle of Republicans, including former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, both of whom have firm support from right wing financiers and lobbyists. [...]

"We can only speculate why widespread tea bagging made [Fox News' Neil] Cavuto think of the Million Man march, unless he got them confused with Dick Armey.

"And in Cavuto's defense, if you are planning simultaneous tea bagging all around the country, you're going to need a Dick Armey."

Between all the talk about Tea Baggers, Dick Armey, and huge stimulus packages, I'm beginning to think the political discourse at least deserves a PG-13 rating.